Today images, such as photographs, still pictures, graphics etc., are commonly viewed in any electronic device having a display. However, it is not enough to enable images being viewed on a display; it is also crucial that the images can be displayed in a reasonable time, as the size of the captured images increases. The users of electronic devices displaying images on a display are in most cases interested in being able to alter the view of the image. Some common operations requested by the user are to zoom into an image to view details of the image, pan in the zoomed image in order to trace a feature or just to get an overview of the details, rotate images in order to facilitate viewing on the display, etc. Moreover, the images handled by users of such electronic devices are of increasing resolution, i.e. the number of pixels defining an image becomes greater and greater.
The electronic devices may, for example, be mobile telephones, personal digital assistance, palm tops, or other devices having limited processing capacity in view of the images to be handled. For instance, a lot of electronic devices having a display for viewing images do not include enough processing capacity to perform operations such as zoom, pan, etc. without presenting frequently occurring and annoying delays between consecutively presented views. This may result in that continuously zooming in or out of an image may be experienced as a presentation of a plurality of images with long delay in-between images. Thus, no experience of continuous zoom is achieved, which may be irritating for the user. This may also result in erroneous handling or inputs by the user.
One common way to address this problem is either to increase the processing capacity of the device or to avoid operations in which the user expects an experience of continuous flow.